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AI Should Be Powering Your CTV Advertising

As advertisers work to capitalize on the opportunity of streaming television, a digital divide is emerging. Programmatic TV offers millions of highly targeted audience impressions, but here’s the catch: They come and go very quickly.

Advertisers have as little as 20 milliseconds to make a decision before a valuable impression is either snatched up by a competitor or simply goes unnoticed. Either way, it’s a lost opportunity.

As CTV platforms try to crack the code, an AI race is underway. It’s not the generative AI making marketing headlines but rather one that quietly sifts through massive troves of data in fractions of a second.

Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) are constantly integrating and analyzing audience signals: household data, behavioral trends, viewing patterns and more. This quickly adds up to zettabytes of data. It’s more than any team of humans could sift through, which is where AI comes in to enable new outcomes.

Ad tech needs an infusion of scalable, AI-driven analytics to process massive amounts of audience and inventory data in real time. This technology will enable advertisers to make better decisions around limited CTV impression opportunities quickly enough to compete for them.

Here’s how advanced computing power can enable DSPs to run the most efficient CTV campaigns and deliver the results that advertisers seek.

Understand CTV’s scarcity problem

With endless screens, devices and modes of television watching now available, fragmentation poses a serious challenge for advertisers. To address the scarcity problem, DSPs must have a complete picture of both the viewer and the marketplace. 

The race for CTV’s finite premium inventory makes it even more important to be able to make decisions as quickly as possible.

Most DSPs fall short because of their architecture. They’re dated. Most were originally built to support digital and display advertising. But the vastness of internet inventory is a far cry from making bids on finite premium CTV media availability.

Adding to this challenge, most DSPs don’t build their whole tech stack in house. Instead, they link together various solutions, from their bidder to fraud detection to measurement. This leads to inefficiencies, data loss and hidden fees for advertisers. When tech stacks are built seamlessly, advertisers can achieve something called gapless data movement. What this means is that they can integrate all knowledge of past and current campaign outcomes and layer machine learning and AI on top to make the smartest decisions for advertisers.

Achieve smarter media buying decisioning in milliseconds

Speed is a chief objective in programmatic, where fractions of a second makes the difference between securing vital media and losing it to a competitor. The race for CTV’s finite premium inventory makes it even more important to be able to make decisions as quickly as possible.

This requires synthesizing troves of data, gauging available audiences and, ultimately, predicting outcomes. Before AI and machine learning, these analytics weren’t possible. But now, technology can sift through massive amounts of information in milliseconds, surfacing informed purchasing decisions for CTV buyers.

To take it a step further, DSPs can leverage historical data on previous bid outcomes and performance trends. The more historical data a system has on CTV, the more it will be able to use AI to accurately predict future outcomes in real time, enabling marketers to make smarter media decisions and optimize campaign strategies as they play out. Couple that with scarcity’s ability to find the right viewer at the exact right moment, and media outcomes get a huge boost.

AI tools are also learning to flag fraudulent CTV media to prevent advertisers from wasting valuable dollars. DSPs with direct premium supply partners give buyers peace of mind when it comes to deal viability and media legitimacy—not to mention the savings of avoiding markups.

Ensure each ad dollar generates maximum impact

DSPs must evolve to use AI to make smarter purchasing decisions based on huge swaths of data in milliseconds. As providers build out these technologies, the industry will start to realize the true promise of CTV: swiftly securing premium inventory and reaching audiences for a given brand, wherever those audiences are.

As more consumers migrate to streaming for their TV consumption, the space will only continue to grow with new platforms and content. In anticipation of this growth, programmatic DSPs need to invest in engineering, technology, and infrastructure to ensure advertisers have tools to act quickly and efficiently when the impression is open for bid.